I've just finished up "Beautiful Testing" (which I would highly recommend) and need to pick up another book.

I'm looking for something fairly current. The content should be somewhat generic to testing. I don't want a "how to" on scripting or coding or a particular tool. I've read the James Whittaker "How To...." books, so unless he has a new one out I'm unaware of I've read those all. If it were inexpensive, or available used on Amazon all the better.

Can this be community wiki - there's no "right" answer for this question.
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AlanJun 6 '11 at 13:55

Agreed. There is no real straight good answer for this.
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HannibalJun 6 '11 at 14:01

when you say fairly current, I think anything in the last 10 years will be good. Still be careful to eliminate Classics (such as "Software Testing Techniques" by Boris Beizer) that will be much older and contain very valuable information in that they layout foundational principles that we are still using today.
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John BurleyJun 6 '11 at 15:00

@John. I agree there are some very good classics out there, but unfortunately for my certification anything too old I'm not able to count towards my annual hours. So I lean towards newer books.
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CKleinJun 7 '11 at 12:36

2

Not sure if you count it as a "How To..." book, but Whittaker does have "Exploratory Software Testing" out which might not be one you've read. I think it might be a year or two old, and I just picked up a copy this weekend, so haven't read it and can't recommend it or not recommend it yet, but thought it worth mentioning.
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Andy TinkhamJun 7 '11 at 22:52

"Perfect Software and other illusions about testing" by Gerald Weinberg should be on your "to read" list.

Here's an interesting example that will give you a flavor of the book.

In chapter 3 "Why Not Just Test Everything?", Weinberg has a section called "There are an infinite number of possible tests." He talks about a backdoor placed into a highly secure program whereby the ordinary password protection could be bypassed by typing W followed by three spaces, then M followed by three spaces, then J followed by exactly 168 more keystrokes without once using the letter L. Then he writes:

"Do you get the point by now? If you
didn't guess that the number of tests
required to exhaustively test software
is infinite, or at least "a number
greater than I could run in my
lifetime", you didn't understand the
point of this chapter. Now you do."

If you are looking for a "how to" book, you should look elsewhere. If you are looking for a "why" (and sometimes "why not") book, this might be for you.

Another really good one is "How We Test Software at Microsoft" by Alan Page, Ken Johnston, and Bj Rollison.

The excellent explanations of Equivalence Class Partitioning and Boundary Value Analysis are among the best I have ever read.

perhaps you could elaborate more on this. What makes it a good book, what did you like about it, etc. Typically I would expect a recommendation to include more than just a title and author.
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corsiKa♦Apr 17 '12 at 18:06

Others have already listed many books that I would have listed. To add some more recent books that I have liked:

Specification by example: How successful teams deliver the right software by Gojko Adzic
This book introduces one way for specifying a product and making sure that the intended product was actually built. Many of the ideas are usable in any environment and will make communication between team members better.

Security and usability by Lorrie Faith Cranor and Simson Garfinkel
I have not finished this book yet, but it is an interesting take on how to think of combining usability and security which are often seen as opposites of each other.

From more classical books I could still mention
Testing Computer Software by Cem Kaner, Jack Falk, and Hung Quoc Nguyen.
This is a good book for learning all the basics of testing.

Any book is a good book if you can apply it to QA and testing. It depends on if you're trying to be a better tester, or trying to understand the domain language better, or you want a new perspective on problems, or you're trying to get a certification.

I recently wrote about the board game Zendo being great for understanding elements of exploratory testing. I believe James Bach reads anything BUT testing books! (Great talk by him on the subject of what to read, amongst other things: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKFqwKSon-E)

Saying that I won a copy of How to Reduce the Cost of Software Testing that I particularly enjoyed. A collection of various long articles on how to reduce "costs", with many different authors and many different perspectives on reducing cost, what "cost" means, and even if we should be focusing on reducing cost. I like books that inspire me to a way of thinking, and this had many ways of thinking to be inspired to.